


An Exchange of Gifts

by Sholio



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Fluff, Gen, Gift Fic, Holidays, Humor, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 03:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We need you to make the numbers come out even," Helen said, shaking the hat at Nikola and rustling the little slips of paper inside. "So, yes, you will." (This story was actually written a couple of years ago; I just realized I never cross-posted it to AO3, and hey, it's seasonal! Takes place in mid-season three.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Exchange of Gifts

"The hell I will," Nikola said.

"We need you to make the numbers come out even," Helen said, shaking the hat at him and rustling the little slips of paper inside. "So, yes, you will."

He folded his arms. "You can't make me."

Kate, sitting on the edge of Helen's desk, smirked at him. "I can make him."

"That won't be necessary." Helen turned a charming smile on Nikola -- damn her -- and held out the hat. He gave her a moment or two to twist in the wind before he snapped, stuck his hand in, and drew out one of the folded slips of paper.

Unfolded it. Read it.

"Do-over!" Nikola said, and tried to put it back, but she'd already whisked the hat away and held it out to Will.

******

"What, in the name of all that's unholy, am I supposed to buy for a Bigfoot?"

"Dude. Keep your voice down." Henry detoured around Nikola on his way from one side of the lab to the other with an armful of steel rod; Nikola didn't bother to move. "It's called _Secret_ Santa, not tell-the-whole-world-including-the-giftee Santa. And I can pretty much guarantee that if you make the Big Guy cry, the boss is gonna kill you."

"Helen is going to kill me if I make the Bigfoot cry," Nikola repeated in disbelief. "How is this my _life_?"

"Look, man, it doesn't have to be a big huge deal. Just put yourself in the other person's shoes and imagine what they might want. Oh wait," Henry said. "It's you. Never mind."

Nikola lifted a lip at him. "Just for that, I think I'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks. I haven't been to the Riviera in some time. See you all in the new year."

Henry sighed, and stripped off his gloves. "Look, this is -- I think Magnus is trying to get back on the horse this Christmas, all right? Admittedly, the way she's chosen to go about it is sort of odd, but I don't think she knows how to handle it that well."

"How to handle what?" Nikola asked, genuinely baffled.

Henry fidgeted with the gloves. "Christmas without Ashley," he said at last. "That's one thing about having a kid -- it really makes you get into the holidays."

"I hated Christmas when I was a child."

Henry sighed. "Of course you did."

"And I don't recall Helen being particularly fond of it at Oxford, either. Frivolous waste of time, we all thought it was."

"I don't know about that." Henry shrugged. "The Big Guy said that before Ashley, they never really did anything other than hang up a holly wreath on the door, and that was only because _he_ wanted to. But then, there was Ashley, and in some sense me, and -- having kids _changes_ you, man."

"I wouldn't know."

Henry balled up the gloves and tossed them onto his workbench with a little more force than was really necessary. "Right, no. But the point is, this is a rough time of year for the boss, for all of us who've been here the longest. We had our own traditions and ways of doing things, but now everything's changed and we're all just floundering around, trying to cope. This is Magnus's way of coping."

"So, in summary, her daughter died and now she's torturing the rest of us because of it?" Nikola said, which was, he realized as soon as the words were out of his mouth, probably a bit heartless even for him.

The look Henry gave him was a raw one, his eyes dark and bleak. "You know what? I think, as a Christmas present to myself, I'd like you to leave now."

"What? You can't throw me out of my lab!"

"It's not _your_ lab," Henry said, and pushed him out the door and locked it.

"When the revolution comes," Nikola snapped at the door, "and I assure you that it _will_ \-- I'll personally see to it that the werewolves are the first to go!"

No answer. He sulked off to see who else was around.

******

"You must know the guy. I mean, he _feeds_ you."

 _We do chat a bit. He keeps me apprised of the news from the outside world._ The mermaid drifted lazily behind the glass, on her back with her tail curved up, like some sort of weird sea otter cracking oysters on its chest. Of course, what was resting on her chest, in her hands, wasn't an oyster but a Gameboy -- the early-1990s kind -- encased completely in flexible plastic. She'd been playing it when he'd come downstairs.

"So? What's he like? What's he do? Most importantly, what can I buy for under five dollars that'll make him happy and satisfy Helen's idea of a quaint little 'family Christmas'?" Nikola made air quotes.

_I don't know. He is a lonely man, an outcast, forced to live among humans because his people have rejected him._

"Boo hoo, cry me a river. _My_ people are extinct and you don't see me moaning about it."

The mermaid flicked her tail and pushed herself upright to look at him. _I am sorry. Many of my people died recently as well. It was a very devastating --_

"Yeah, well, sorry to hear it, must have been awful. Let me know if you think of anything."

******

He thought about asking Machinegun Barbie, since she'd been spending more time lately with the walking fur coat than anyone else. But then he passed Helen and Kate in the hall, with their heads together, giggling over a slip of paper, and decided that he really, really did not want to get involved. And Will was out, because Will would just laugh at his suffering. (There were times when Nikola thought the kid had definite potential.)

He could just flee, and come back when everyone had forgotten. But that would mean _failure_. Nikola never could abide not being the best at something.

Besides, it was really just a matter of looking at the situation from all angles and figuring out how he could best work it to his advantage. Granted, it would have been easier if he'd gotten _any_ other recipient in the gift exchange, because he could think of reasons that it might be useful for any of the others to owe him a favor if he could come up with a suitably awesome gift. Bigfoot, however, not so much. He briefly toyed with the idea of finding whoever had Helen and swapping with them. But he wasn't about to debase himself and beg (or _ask_ , whatever, same thing really), which left cleverly finding their strip of paper, swapping his out for theirs, and then finding some way to convince them that they'd had the Bigfoot all along. Even Will wasn't _that_ gullible. And he wouldn't have a working prototype of his mind control ray for decades at the rate things were going...

Bugger.

When inspiration struck, though, it struck hard.

******

"No," Henry said. "No, no way, not a chance. I am not helping you --"

"As if your _help_ would be any use to me," Nikola said, affronted. "It's lab space and materials that I need."

"Whatever. Dude. You can't use my lab to build a sasquatch sexbot. That's just not on."

"Robot _woman_ ," Nikola said. "Bigfoot style."

"It's still just not right. And the answer is no, a thousand times no, are you still not getting this?"

Nikola grinned at him with manic cheerfulness. "Like you can stop me."

"I can't, you're right, but Magnus can, and that's exactly where I'm going if you keep asking."

"Whatever happened to keeping it secret?" Nikola called after him. 

Really, and they said _he_ was the one who couldn't get into the proper spirit of the holiday?

******

He thought about building it anyway, but having to deal with the inevitable whining and obstructionism wouldn't really be worth it. He did make some design notes for an army of robot vampire women (with lasers!) before sanity got the better of him, though.

Which left him back at square one, which was no farther than he'd managed to get by the time Christmas Eve rolled around. The Internet was no help since he had no idea what he was looking for, and finally he had to face facts: he was going to have to go downtown and buy some sort of cheap imported crap in an actual store. (At this point, he'd be damned if he was paying more than a few bucks for whatever it was. Maybe he'd buy the sasquatch a new feather duster or something.)

"I'm going out!" Nikola bellowed as he headed towards the door, pulling on his coat. "I may not be back before Christmas! Or at all! Just so you know!"

"Good riddance!" Kate called down the stairs.

These people totally didn't deserve him.

******

If he'd thought about it, or bothered to pay that much attention to the ways and doings of mortals lately, he would have realized that the streets would be thronged with shoppers on Christmas Eve. Not only did he have to shop for a gift he didn't want to buy, for someone he didn't like, but he had to do it while jostling elbow-to-elbow with the rank and file of ordinary humanity.

He whipped out his phone within five minutes of touching foot to pavement in downtown Old City, and fired off an annoyed email to Helen. Five minutes later, another. Four minutes later, yet another, since all he could do to reciprocally annoy her was stuff her inbox with emails like _I just saw two grown women rip the legs off a Barbie doll in a tug-of-war! There is no hope for this species, Magnus. Do you still have the plans for my new and better death ray prototype that I emailed you the other week?_

Adding an extra layer of misery to the experience, it started to snow, which then turned to slushy rain. His Italian leather shoes were _ruined_. "I should've had them leave me in the cave with the multipedes," Nikola remarked to no one in particular. "I hate them all."

As the stores began to close one by one, he gave up on the whole appalling experience and went looking for a bar, only to discover that most of them were closing early as well. "This day couldn't get any worse," he snarled, and tapped out another rapid-fire email to Helen on the phone's tiny keyboard: _I can't even get drunk properly in this miserable town, are you HAPPY?_

Eventually he located a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall, its only concession to the season a wilted sprig of what was probably supposed to be mistletoe nailed to the door, where he obtained a bottle of truly execrable merlot and a sticky table in the corner. The only people in the place, besides himself, were a handful of wet, depressed-looking locals, all of them sitting alone and all of them looking like they were trying out for the part of Bum #3 at Central Casting. 

"We're closing in an hour," the bartender told him.

"Fuck off," Nikola said, and fired off another email: _When I rule the world, this town is going to become the parking lot for the Nikola Tesla Museum of Science and Industry._

Maybe he could wrap one of the Bigfoot's own feather dusters and claim it was a new one.

Half the bottle later, the bartender began shooing patrons out into the rain. "Do you know who I am?" Nikola demanded, glaring at him. "I'm Nikola Tesla, you small-minded inferior life form."

"What a coincidence; I'm the King of Spain. Out, buddy, or I'm calling the cops."

The thought crossed Nikola's mind that having to call Helen -- or, worse, the rest of the Scooby Gang -- and ask them to bail him out on Christmas Eve _would_ actually make his day worse. A lot worse. "If I were still a vampire, I'd rip your throat out right now," Nikola informed him loftily as he gathered up the bottle. "Lucky for you I'm not anymore."

The bartender didn't even blink; presumably he'd heard stranger things. "Out."

Nikola slouched out into the rain with the rest of the rejects. He almost ran into one of them when the guy stopped in the doorway and turned around, blinking at Nikola and then opening his trench coat. "Hey, buddy, want to buy --"

"God, no," Nikola said quickly, covering his eyes with the hand not holding the wine bottle. 

"-- a cat?"

"What?" Nikola lowered his hand to see that the guy was holding up, by the scruff of its neck, the ugliest kitten he'd ever seen. 

"Daughter's cat got knocked up," the drunk explained, and Nikola thought, _By WHAT, a hammerhead shark?_ "Wife tol' me to get rid of 'em. Just gonna have to knock it in the head otherwise."

"No, I don't want to buy your damn cat," Nikola said as soon as he could get a word in edgewise, but the sentence had no sooner left his mouth when he realized that, _actually_ \-- "Wait, no, I'll give you a buck for it."

"Ten."

"Are you _joking_? Have you looked at that thing?"

After a bit of haggling, the moron agreed to part with the world's ugliest kitten for $3. As the drunk wandered off down the deserted street, Nikola held the cat up to the nearest streetlamp by the loose, sparsely furred skin on its nape. It struggled a bit and then settled down, dangling from his hand and gazing at him from its beady green eyes.

All four of them.

******

The light was still on in Helen's office when he eventually made it back to the Sanctuary, which didn't surprise him; the woman never seemed to sleep. For all he knew, maybe she _didn't_ sleep. She looked up from her paperwork as he dripped into the room, and blinked. "Nikola? What happened to you?"

"What do you _mean_ , what happened to me? Didn't you read my emails?"

Helen folded her hands on the desktop and smiled beatifically at him. "You mean the ones with subject lines like _I HATE YOU ALL_ and _FUCK YOU, MAGNUS, AND YOUR PET BIGFOOT TOO_? No, I filed them for the next time I'm having a bad day and need a good laugh. Merry Christmas, by the way." She pointed at the clock, which read 1:02.

"Oh, like I care," Nikola said. "I plan to celebrate by taking a long hot shower and drinking myself into oblivion, but first, I found a freak --"

"-- abnormal --"

"-- for your little petting zoo of the weird." He reached into his pocket; the kitten had fallen asleep, curled up in a small warm ball. It squeaked unhappily when he pulled it out. "Ever seen one of these before?"

"No, I can't say I have." Helen took it gently in her cupped hands. It uncurled, stretched and opened its little pink mouth in a yawn, then squeaked at her. 

Suck-up. 

Helen prodded gently at the small, scrawny body. "It looks almost like an immature cactus weasel -- _Mustela cactii_ \-- but the spines are too short and soft. And, of course, there are only just the four eyes."

"Whatever it is, it's half cat," Nikola said. "At least, that's what the guy who sold it to me said."

Helen looked up sharply. " _Sold_ it to you?"

She looked disappointed in him, which bothered him more than it probably ought to have. "It was cheap," he said defensively. "Look, are they, like -- dangerous or anything? Deadly bite? Poison on the spines? Grows to be the size of a horse?"

"No, not at all." Helen ran a finger down the creature's back. It emitted a small buzzing purr. "They're not even carnivores, and very gentle. That's why there are so few of them left in the wild."

"Excellent." Nikola snatched it back and popped it into his pocket. "See you in the morning."

"Nikola." Helen fixed him with a gimlet glare. "If you're planning on _selling_ her --" the word was imbued with as much loathing as she could pack into it -- "you should know that there's very little market for them, even amongst collectors, and particularly not a hybrid."

"Don't be absurd, Helen." Nikola swept her a small bow. "I'm not going to sell the Bigfoot's Christmas present. I may be a magnificent bastard, emphasis on the _magnificent_ , but I'm not an utter asshole."

"I ... see." Helen's lips twitched. "That's very thoughtful of you, Nikola."

"I am nothing if not thoughtful." He turned towards the door, then turned back as a thought struck him. "What do they eat?"

"Well, cactus, of course," Helen said. "Hence the name."

"Really? I thought it was because it looks like one."

"No, no. That's its protective camouflage."

Nikola waved a hand. "Be that as it may, do we have any? And I hope the feed warehouses are better catalogued than Henry's metalworks, because I'm exhausted, wet, and not nearly as drunk as I planned to be by this point in the evening."

"I'd have to check the inventory," Helen said, "but cactus weasels aren't picky, generally. Any vegetable matter should do."

Nikola made his getaway before she could turn the conversation into a discourse on the Care and Feeding of Cactus Weasels. He didn't care; he was only going to have the thing for another twelve hours or so, tops, and even _he_ probably couldn't kill it in that amount of time. Hopefully not. If so, then the feather-duster plan was still on the table.

The small animal ate the carrot tops and lettuce that he found in the kitchens with apparent gusto, then curled up happily in a nest made from one of Henry's T-shirts. (The werewolf kept spare clothing stashed in a half-dozen places around the building, and Nikola knew where most of Henry's caches were. Like hell he was sacrificing one of _his_ shirts.) After that, Nikola went off to raid Helen's wine cellar and then attempted to take a long enough shower to drain the Sanctuary's hot water tanks, which would totally serve all of them right.

******

At some point during the night, the cactus weasel, or whatever it was, relocated from its nest into Nikola's bed. He woke up to find it curled into a tight ball on his pillow. Multiple sets of green eyes blinked at him from two inches in front of his nose.

"Don't get used to it, you little freeloader. I don't even like you."

He made a point of avoiding all the populated areas of the mansion during the course of the day, not wanting to know what sort of festive activities Team Idiot was getting up to in honor of the occasion. He figured that Helen would find him, or send someone to find him, whenever his presence was required. Sure enough, he was sitting in one of the smaller auxiliary labs, refining the plans for the death ray with the kitten curled up in his lap, when Kate stuck her head in the door. "Hey, Sunshine, Magnus's office, pronto."

"Tell her I'll be there when I'm done with the plasma accelerator array."

"O... kay." She was wearing a set of stuffed antlers with little jingle bells on them, which assured Nikola that his avoid-the-neighbors plan for the day had been a wise one. She also had a red Santa hat in her hands, with a pompom; she used the hat to gesture in his direction. "Hey, you look like you could use some holiday cheer --"

"If you attempt to put that on my head," Nikola said, "you're going to eat it."

"Oh really? Really, Magnet Boy? _Bring_ it."

"I will be there when I'm _done_. Sans hat. What is it with you people?"

Once she was gone, he made a few more notes -- genius waits for no one, after all -- and then looked around the lab for a suitably kitten-sized box, which he finally obtained by dumping out a heap of bolts on the floor. (It wasn't _his_ lab, as Henry was fond of reminding him, so cleaning it up was someone else's problem.) In went the kitten, along with the T-shirt. After a moment's thought, he added some air holes, just in case; a box of dead kitten probably wasn't going to lead to Helen dropping her panties anytime in the near future. Then he hied off to Helen's office, with a brief stop at the wine cellar for two vintage bottles, because he had a feeling that he wasn't going to be able to get through this without some chemical fortification.

"Your present goes there," Helen said, as soon as he stepped inside, pointing to a colorful collection of boxes and bags on the end of her desk. The rest of the Avengers had assembled and were sprawled over various pieces of furniture with glasses of what was probably eggnog. Nikola had never held with eggnog; it was an inefficient and calorie-laden alcohol delivery system as far as he was concerned.

"What? Why?"

"So that it's anonymous," Helen said with the air of faint martyrdom that meant she'd already explained this multiple times.

"What? We're not allowed to claim credit for it?" Nikola kept tight hold of the box. "What's the point of doing this if we don't get credit?"

"Box. Desk."

"And how is anyone supposed to know which present is for whom?" Nikola pointed out reasonably.

"Because people put _names_ on their gifts, genius," Kate said, gesturing with her glass of eggnog. "Have you ever actually given someone a gift before?"

Nikola snorted. "Of course I have. I'm a hundred and fifty-three years old; obviously I _must_ have, at some point." He started to slam the box down on the desk and only pulled back at the last minute when Helen's eyes went gratifyingly wide; of course, she knew what was in it. "Name goes on the box. _Fine_. All these _rules_ , no one ever tells me anything..." He picked up the most expensive fountain pen on Helen's desk, scrawled BIGFOOT across the top of the box in the largest letters he could manage to fit into the space, and then shoved it with the others. "There. Happy?"

"Very," Helen said smoothly, retrieving her pen. "All right, we'll go clockwise. Each of you, come up and retrieve your gift in your turn."

Nikola slammed back his wine -- a crime to do to a good Bordeaux, but he needed to get more alcohol into his system, STAT -- and poured another glass. Slouched in the nearest chair to the door, he went rapidly through two more glasses while watching Kate exclaim over her shiny new mini-Uzi with a bow on it. Bigfoot was next, thankfully, which meant he could get the suspense over with.

"One of Henry's T-shirts?" the Bigfoot rumbled, peeking in the box.

"Hey!" Henry protested, and turned a glower on Nikola. "That's low even for you."

"Anonymous," Helen reminded them.

"It's _in_ the T-shirt, Chewbacca," Nikola said shortly.

The Bigfoot pulled back the folded shirt -- Nikola had a moment to visualize what Helen's face would look like when that hairy mitt pulled out a dead, suffocated kitten -- and then removed from the box a very alive and still memorably ugly kitten.

"Oh," the Bigfoot said softly, cupping it and holding it up to his cheek. The kitten meeped and licked his face, then tested his shoulder with a small, scruffy paw. As it crawled into his hair, he turned his head to Nikola. "Thank you."

As his lone concession to the alleged spirit of the holiday, Nikola managed to stifle the first, second and third snide remark that came to mind. "I don't know what makes you think it was me. Anonymous, remember?" He reached to pour himself another glass of wine and discovered that the bottle was empty. He was going to be feeling this soon. _Damn_ the loss of his vampire alcohol tolerance.

"Nikola," Helen said.

" _What_?" he retorted. "What arcane holiday rule have I broken _now_?"

Helen's lips were twitching in earnest now, and she had to take a sip of eggnog before getting enough control of herself to say, "None of them; it's your turn now, that's all."

"My turn to wha -- oh." Somehow, the thought had never occurred to him, in the whole extended nightmare, that someone had drawn _his_ name out of the hat as well. "Can I pass?"

"No," Helen said, with steel in her eyes.

So he went up to the desk and found the one with his name on its tag, written in a very familiar looping hand, such as they'd taught at girls' finishing schools a century and a half ago. The shape of the box was familiar as well: precisely the length, width and depth of a 750 mL bottle.

"Gee," Nikola said, tilting it. "I _wonder_ what's in it."

"What _does_ one get the genius who has everything?" Helen inquired, her eyes sparkling.

"Source blood comes immediately to mind," Nikola said pointedly, and her sparkling eyes sparkled brighter. That eggnog must be potent stuff. 

"Nice try," she murmured, "but sorry, no."

"Well?" Will said. "Go on, open it."

"Can't get to the alcohol without opening the box," he conceded, and theatrically tore off the gold paper. Then he had to stare for a moment. "Is this _genuine?"_

__Kate left off petting her mini-Uzi to lean forward. "What?"

Nikola tilted the bottle to stare at the label. "An _authentic_ 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam?"

"Oh," Kate said. "Wine."

Henry nodded. "I thought the box was just to throw him off."

Nikola swept a withering glower over the lot of them. "It's _only_ one of the finest wines ever bottled, one of the few to receive a perfect score from -- and why am I telling you this? Suffice it to say that these are incredibly rare and _fantastically_ expensive."

"It helps to have connections," Helen murmured, and the corner of her mouth curved up. "It also helps to have known Baron Rothschild -- Philippe to his friends."

"Of course you did," Nikola sighed.

He was not about to open it for an occasion such as this, but the mere presence of the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild got him through the rest of the gifting, all the way to Helen, who received an antique-looking gold locket from her anonymous benefactor. Nikola had no idea what was in it, and for once, everyone in the room managed to maintain credible poker faces. But he saw her eyes go soft for a moment before she snapped it shut and tucked it away gently in her desk.

Helen cleared her throat after a pause, and raised her nearly-empty glass of eggnog. As she opened her mouth to make whatever toast she had in mind, Nikola's tenuous control over his sarcastic side slipped. "Are you seriously planning to make a toast with _eggnog_? Have you no _soul_?"

Helen lowered the glass. "Are you prepared to sacrifice the Rothschild?" she inquired, looking amused.

"Over my dead body," Nikola said flatly. "But I can do better than eggnog." He went to collect more glasses and another wine bottle -- the other one he'd brought was certainly not going to be enough. "Eggnog. God. I'm surrounded by utter Philistines. The burdens that I have to bear, living with you people ..."

As Nikola poured out the glasses, Henry said, "I notice you're not sharing your super-fancy gift wine."

"Of course I'm not sharing my gift wine. None of you have palates refined enough to appreciate it. Pearls before swine, and all that."

"He just called us swine," Will said to Kate.

"You're surprised?"

"Not really, no."

Gamely ignoring the peanut gallery, Nikola passed around the wine and gave his own glass an approving sniff. Then he nodded to Helen, who flickered her quicksilver smile, and nodded back. After a moment of silence, she began to speak.

"The last few years have been ... difficult. For all of us. We've fought, we've struggled. We've failed more than once." Her eyes were dark with a sorrow that Nikola wished suddenly he didn't have to see. "A great deal has been lost. But --" and now triumph flashed on her face, the look that Nikola remembered when she'd made a discovery in the lab, when she'd tangled with a new set of equations and won. "A great deal has also been gained. We've won important victories. We've saved lives. In our small way, we've made the world a little safer, a little more just."

Nikola wondered to what extent he was included in that _we_ , but her eyes passed over each of them in turn, and did not skip him.

"To the future," Helen continued, raising her glass. "May we be strong enough to accept its challenges, and gracious enough to appreciate its blessings."

A low murmur of "hear, hear" whispered around the room. Nikola raised his glass silently; let them take that as they would. Given his current state, he had no intention of pretending any more optimism about the future than he had to. Swapping immortality for a finite lifespan and a room at Casa del Hero was a fool's bargain.

As he sipped his wine, though, and listened to the cheerful babble of conversation beginning to rise in the room, he was forced to acknowledge that he wasn't the only person present who'd suffered in the last few years. Well, the kids hardly knew suffering yet, but Helen -- His eyes went to her, as she spoke to Will, wine in hand and a light flush on her cheeks. The number of things that the last century, not to mention her crusade for justice, had cost her was truly staggering. And it hurt her all the more because she felt things so much more deeply than she ought to.

One couldn't live an immortal life and care for things. For people. Everything would go, sooner or later; everything and everyone must be replaced, and so must be considered replaceable. To do otherwise was to court an endless, spiraling mountain of misery and regret, that would eventually crush a human -- or demi-human -- soul under its weight.

Did it change anything, being mortal? He rolled the glass between his hands, and wondered. He didn't _feel_ any different, aside from the frustration and anger that he lived with every day: the awareness that he'd had something beautiful, something unspeakably precious and rare, and it had been snatched from him. Becoming a vampire in the first place had been much the same way -- he'd appreciated the gift that had awakened in him, but he didn't recall being a different person afterwards.

_I was born a selfish, shallow asshole,_ he thought, _and I plan to die one -- hopefully not for a number of centuries yet._

Still, he could've left, could've slipped out the door and gone back to the lab. It was what he'd planned to do, after all. No one would have noticed -- and if that thought made him feel the tiniest bit isolated, well, he could blame it on the wine.

But with a bottle and a half of wine in him, and no vampire metabolism to soak it up (damn it, _damn_ it), he found that it was more comfortable to stay slouched in his chair, even when Helen dragged out an antique-looking TV and a DVD player that by all rights should not have been able to work with it -- even with the massive wad of spliced-together wires connecting the two of them -- and fanned out a handful of holiday movies. Even when the damn kitten crawled off the Bigfoot's shoulder and made itself comfortable in the cozy crevice between his thigh and the side of the chair. "Go _home_ , you fuzzy little bastard, before I find out what barbecued kitten tastes like," he told it, but it just snuggled down deeper -- no more concerned than if he'd patted it on the head. Just like the rest of them. The little irritant was going to fit right in.


End file.
